1970s deed may throw glitch into Caesars' Woodbury casino plan

Friday

Aug 22, 2014 at 6:31 PMAug 22, 2014 at 6:34 PM

Chris McKenna

The descendants of Gilded Age railroad baron E.H. Harriman are threatening litigation to thwart Caesars Entertainment’s bid to build a casino resort on Woodbury land that was once part of the Harrimans’ sprawling empire in Orange County.

Their weapon is a deed restriction prohibiting a hotel on the property, which was inserted when Averell Harriman – son of E.H. and governor of New York from 1955 to 1958 – sold that and surrounding land to Avon Products in 1971, and kept in effect through subsequent sales.

Caesars and its development partner sought to avoid that obstacle by securing an adjacent strip of land owned by Norfolk Southern Railroad, which had no such deed restrictions.

Caesars plans to build a casino on the main site and an attached, 300-room hotel on the neighboring parcel, if it wins a state casino license.

But that solution doesn't sit well with the Harriman family, whose attorney has voiced objections in a letter to the chairman of the Resort Gaming Facility Location Board.

The board is evaluating 17 applications, nine of which are competing for one or two licenses in Orange, Ulster and Sullivan counties.

“Apparently, Caesars is of the mind that the two components of the casino hotel are separate and stand alone,” Goshen attorney James Sweeney wrote on Wednesday. “If this is Caesars’ mindset, it is wrong. … The casino cannot be severed from the hotel. It remains part of its ‘purposes’ and thus, it is banned by the deed restriction.”

He warned that the family “is determined to enforce this restriction through the court system should a gaming license be awarded to Caesars.”

A Caesars executive responded with a statement on Friday that dismissed Sweeney’s argument as “a baseless claim that will have no impact on the gaming license application.”

“Mr. Sweeney’s clients do not own or have any rights to the property where the hotel will be built and, therefore, have no legal claim to restrict development of this land,” said Jan Jones Blackhurst, executive vice president for communications and government relations at Caesars. “Simply put, the proposed hotel site is not subject to any deed restrictions.”

The project site is a stretch of vacant land between the Harriman Metro-North station and the former Nepera chemical plant, about two miles south of Woodbury Common Premium Outlets.

Sweeney told the board in his letter that the Harriman family wants to “preserve the compelling beauty of the Ramapo Valley,” and that allowing a “huge and very intrusive facility” there would mar its legacy.

“The Harrimans have been good stewards of this land for over a century,” he wrote.